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Is It Worth It: Meal Delivery Services

More Americans are limiting their trips to the grocery store and relying on meal delivery services like Blue Apron to feed their families.

But is the convenience worth the cost? Larry Miller from our Washington sister station, WUSA, put his own Blue Apron subscription to the test and shared his results.

My family is no stranger to meal delivery services.

We subscribed to Blue Apron 4 months ago, mainly out of convenience. We get two meals for 4 people delivered once a week on Sundays.

One of the meals we got Is a Za'atar Chicken Souvlaki. The recipe calls 4 chicken breasts, 4 pocketless pitas, tahini sauce, one onion and a few other items. The cost of this meal to feed four is about $35, or half of the nearly $70 we pay a week.

So, is our time-saving luxury saving or wasting money?

We headed to one of the more moderately-priced grocery stores in town to check it out.

Aisle-by-aisle we picked up our items noted in the ingredients list.

We got the chicken -- that cost nearly $10. The pitas were about $3. The yogurt was only a buck. We also got tahini, which was pretty pricey.

"So the recipe calls for for a couple of teaspoons of tahini sauce, but at the grocery store, you can only get a jar like this, and this alone is about $11."

The total cost of the ingredients: about $36. So in this case, the Blue Apron was cheaper than going to the store and getting groceries on your own.

So it seems you can save time and money with a home delivery service.

It's worth noting that not every meal works out this way. Depending on sales and prices, it's likely grocery stores will beat meal delivery costs.

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